Review: ‘Labyrinths,’ Emma and Carl Jung’s Complex Marriage

Carl Jung called his separate selves “Personality No. 1” and “Personality No. 2.” No. 1 was a magnificent extrovert, performing his brilliance, steamrolling his colleagues, blowing away admirers with gusts of charm. No. 2, on the other hand, was a kettle of insecurities: introverted, anxious, tortured by voices and dark waking fantasies. At least once in his adult life, he seemed to suffer an episode of psychosis; as a young boy, images both psychedelic and profane would rudely obtrude on his thoughts, including a vision of God seated on a throne high above a cathedral and shattering its roof with a well-aimed bullet of ordure.

In his 1963 review of Jung’s autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott said it outright: “Jung, in describing himself, gives us a picture of childhood schizophrenia.” Yet through Jung’s own laborious exertions, he somehow healed himself. “At cost he recovered,” Winnicott wrote, “and part of the cost to him is what he paid out to us, if we can listen and hear, in terms of his exceptional insight.”

One could say that Jung made a psychoanalytic philosophy out of his doubleness. He theorized that many of us, not just the mentally ill, are split personalities, awaiting integration.

Subsequent generations of tortured souls may have benefited from Jung’s bewitching complexity. But one woman also married it. At just 19 years old, Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, tied her fate to this penniless, clever man, correctly intuiting that he would offer her something beyond the monochromatic tedium of an haut-bourgeois life. What she couldn’t have known was the parlous nature of his mental stability. Or that he’d been sexually molested as a boy.

“All these secrets, and Emma knew none of them,” writes Catrine Clay, an English documentarian and author, in “Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis.”

Perhaps the most challenging discovery Emma would make: Her husband had a keen aversion to monogamy. Over the course of his career, he’d develop intense attachments to female patients, many of whom would later become analysts themselves. One, Toni Wolff, became the muse to his darker side. Carl insisted on her full inclusion in the family — which the children naturally despised — and she accompanied the Jungs to dinner parties and trips abroad for decades.

Sigmund Freud, who hoped to make Jung his intellectual heir, did not approve, sending him subtle letters of reproach.

A brief word about Ms. Clay’s enigmatic title: In the 1925 paper “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” Jung stipulated that in a typical union, one partner has a positive relationship with his or her parents; the other has a more complex tie and is therefore “burdened with hereditary traits that are sometimes very difficult to reconcile.” And to live with.

“Their partners can easily lose themselves in such a labyrinthine nature,” he wrote, “sometimes in a not very agreeable way, since their sole occupation then consists in tracking the other through all the twists and turns of his character.”

It doesn’t take much of a genius to figure out where Jung got this idea.

“Labyrinths” was well received when published in England this summer. Yet throughout the first half of the book, no matter how much I squinted, I could not discern why. The subject is rich, definitely, and Jungian analysis has a groovy, woo-woo sort of appeal. But Ms. Clay’s sourcing is thin. She devotes pages of filler to the glorious architecture of Middle Europe — sounding uncomfortably close to the sales pitch for a Viking River Cruise — and to the menu at the Jungs’ wedding, and to the wares of the Bahnhofstrasse, and to the costume of the day.

It all seems a clumsy attempt at trompe l’oeil, to give the illusion of depth. My l’oeil wasn’t tromped.

One partial explanation: Emma Jung didn’t start to come into her own until she was close to 30, and Carl Jung’s life became vastly more interesting (and for a while, turbulent) once he broke with Freud, his surrogate father. Over time, the portrait promised by Ms. Clay’s subtitle does start to emerge, if not quite with the grace or high-resolution clarity one would like.

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Catrine ClayCreditJohn Goodyer

Perhaps most striking is how remarkably adaptable Emma was — and how familiar her predicament still feels. Any semi-sentient observer of American politics has a pretty good idea of what it’s like for a smart woman to bind her fortune to a charismatic man with a wandering eye, a fellow who creates a gravitational warp so pronounced that all objects go rolling in his direction.

And Emma, too, followed in her husband’s footsteps, which at the time made her a true pioneer. Eventually, at Carl’s urging, Emma underwent her own analysis. She became an analyst once their five children were grown. She lectured; she traveled with Carl to conferences; she wrote a book about the symbolism of the Holy Grail. Her patients adored her, describing her as direct and empathetic.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising. Even while her children were young, Emma was brazen enough to start a correspondence with Freud without her husband’s awareness. Ostensibly, it was to help narrow the rift she sensed was growing between the two men — “I have been tormented by the idea that your relation with my husband is not altogether what it should be,” she first wrote — but eventually she found herself challenging Freud in deeply personal ways.

“I wanted to ask then if you are sure that your children would not be helped by analysis,” she wrote in a subsequent letter, and then added with astonishing temerity: “You said you didn’t have time to analyze your children’s dreams because you had to earn money so that they could go on dreaming.” She didn’t buy it. “I have found with Carl also that the imperative ‘earn money’ is only an evasion of something else to which he has resistances.”

The woman was an extraordinarily quick study.

Carl Jung may have encouraged his wife’s professional growth for selfish reasons. It lessened her dependence on him, and therefore gave him freer rein to explore his darker, second self. But in giving her a chance to “individuate” — to come into her own, to become whole — Emma was able to do something that most women of her generation could never do: to further their educations, to fulfill their yearnings to be part of the wider world. Emma had always wanted to go to college to study the natural sciences. In a sense, she eventually did.

The price Emma paid may have been steep. But one thing is clear: She was serene at the end of her life. She had her career, her 19 grandchildren, and finally, her husband’s undivided attention. He always needed her more than she needed him.